Confessions of a Yakuza (24 page)

A lot of people seem to think that gambling’s always crooked, but they couldn’t be more wrong. There
are
gamblers who cheat, of course, but the real professionals never do. I mean, think about it. Naturally, you do get newcomers at some games, but there are plenty of old hands, too. So if you didn’t play it straight, you’d soon get caught. Word would get around, and people would stop coming, it’s as simple as that. So the men running their own joints inside a fixed territory never cheat under any circumstances. The people who
do
cheat are the gamblers who go it alone, without any kind of boss–follower relationships. They don’t have any place of their own, and they hold their sessions in a room at an inn or somewhere.

There are dozens of ways of rigging games, but the most common one is to use loaded dice, which you get a professional dice-maker to produce; he’ll only do it through a go-between, of course, someone he can trust never to mention his name. This usually involves weighting the dice inside with lead, so that either odd or even numbers tend to turn up more often. The “shooter” then slips the loaded dice into the cup to suit himself, whenever the betting gets one-sided. But there’s another special type of dice as well, with powder inside, and a tiny hole. When you shake it, a little bit of the stuff comes out whenever it’s at a certain angle—but not enough to notice normally unless you really strain your eyes. At first it’s just a perfectly ordinary dice, but as the game progresses its balance is upset, and the spots begin to turn up more odd than even or whatever. Still, it’s always best to keep the room dark with that sort of dice. You’ve had it if anyone notices those specks of dust....

One glance at a player, though, is usually enough to tell you what kind of person he is. Better still, watch how he handles his money. Generally speaking, the loser in life is a loser at dice. He’s so keen to win that he can’t see how things are as a whole. He dithers over which way to bet, and then bets without looking properly. It’s a bit like Sumo wrestlers. If a wrestler feels pressed or uncertain what to do, his body tightens up and won’t move as he wants it to; he’s lost the bout even before he’s put any effort into it. You often see that kind of bout, and you see just the same sort of thing with gambling. A wrestler who’s undecided may use his arms, but he can’t use his legs properly at the same time. Well, he may use them, but his mind is there before him, and he ends up losing.

Another thing: the professional gambler never worries about where a customer got the money he has to play with. After all, money can’t talk, it’s just pieces of paper, so you can never tell what he went through to get hold of it. The cash you see him holding in his hand might have come from stripping the quilts off his wife as she lay sick in bed, or by hocking all her kimonos and the sashes with them, but you can’t afford to worry about things like that.

There’s a line in an old song: “Using the money he sold his missus for.” Well, there really
were
men who’d sell their wife to a brothel so they could gamble with the money. It wasn’t hard to find a “broker” in those days—the sort that bought and sold women—and a man could just go to one of them and say: “I need some cash. I’ll leave the wife with you, so lend me some till tomorrow.” “OK,” the broker would say. “Let’s see now—I reckon she’d fetch”—and he’d name a figure—“so I’ll give you half.”

But he’d never win with money he’d gone to such lengths to get—he’d lose the lot. So what happened then? “We made an agreement, didn’t we?” the other man would tell him, and he’d take his wife off and sell her to a brothel.

As for myself, gambling was my profession, and no matter how much a loser like that cried and begged me to do something, it was none of my business.

Let’s face it, gambling is a mug’s game. It’s like putting an old pestle in an empty mortar and grinding away with it; the pestle gradually gets shorter, till you’ve got nothing left. Things are arranged that way from the start, so that the money, in the end, is all swallowed up. But you can’t stop people hoping their lucky number will come up. It’s pretty frightening, really, when you think about it....

You may remember I made friends in jail with someone called Muraoka, who helped me get started in Uguisudani. Well, a year or two later he went off to Manchuria, but before he left he asked me to keep an eye on his two stepsisters. He’d rented a house for them not far away. Muraoka had a bull neck, a square jaw, and a flattened nose, but both girls were really pretty, and the oldest of them, Osei, was bright as well. She had a way with men ... she’d get a man interested in her, then watch for a chance to duck out of reach, but still keep him dangling on a string. Her timing was perfect.... Neither of them, in fact, really needed any looking after at all.

Anyway, I saw quite a lot of Osei myself over the years. “Uncle,” she used to call me. I had a wife by then, of course, but I didn’t think of myself as being all that old, so one day I told her not to call me that. What was wrong with “brother,” I asked. But she just laughed: “You might take advantage of it,” she said. “I’ll settle for uncle.” And she stuck to it, right to the end.

One time—it was probably still fairly early in the war, because business was lousy around then—I didn’t see her for about ten days, then when she did show up she said:

“Uncle—I’ve got a very special favor to ask.”

“What is it,” I said, “and why all of a sudden like this?”

“Lend me some money, will you?”

“How much?”

“A thousand yen.”

That shook me. It wasn’t the kind of sum you asked anyone for lightly. I wanted to know why.

“It’s got nothing to do with you,” she said. “Just lend it to me and don’t ask questions.”

“Look, Osei,” I told her, “are you trying to make me feel small or something? You know I don’t have that kind of money at my place.”

For quite a while, in fact, we’d been going through such a rough patch that I hardly had anything available, let alone enough to lend people. Luckily, I’d been able to farm out some of my men elsewhere, so I could just get by, but there was hardly any cash in hand at all. Being a man, I naturally wanted to help out a pretty girl like her, but this was one case where even that was impossible.

So what do you think she said next? She asked me to be a guarantor. The catch was, I was supposed to guarantee a woman—her—being used as security. I’d better explain.

There was a pawnbroker in Asakusa called Marushichi, and Osei had hocked a great pile of kimonos to them for a thousand yen. For a pawnbroker to fork out money like that, the kimonos themselves must have been worth several times that much. Apparently, the reason she’d borrowed such a hefty amount was that there were some goods she wanted to buy up for resale. She didn’t tell me as much herself, but I was pretty sure it was black-market stuff. She just couldn’t get enough money together, though, so she’d talked about it to a man called Seishichi, a playboy whose father owned a lot of land in Asakusa. It seems she was having an affair with him.

According to Osei, Seishichi had told her: “I could lend it to you easily enough, but that’d be no fun. Why don’t we do it like this? There’s another pawnbroker called Maruto. If I ask them, I’m sure they’ll offer you more for the kimonos than Marushichi did. So the first thing to do is redeem them, then take them and hock them at Maruto.”

“Yes, but I don’t have any cash,” Osei had said, “so how can I get them out of the first place?”

Seishichi laughed. “That’s the interesting part. You can pawn
yourself
instead. Then while you’re sitting in the cage at Marushichi, I’ll take the clothes to Maruto and borrow the money there. If I take them myself, they’ll give me a good rate, so I’ll bring the money back, pay off Marushichi with interest, and get you back. There—isn’t that a good idea?”

It sounded typical of him to me. Only somebody with his time and money to waste could come up with such a harebrained scheme. His father, too, believed in burning the candle at both ends—he even told me once that he’d cover
any
losses his boy made at my place—so no wonder Seishichi had turned out that way. “Fun” was the name of their game.

“I’m not going to interfere with anything you two want to do,” I told Osei, “but Marushichi’s always been known as a respectable business. I’m sure they’d refuse to take a woman instead of a normal pledge.”

“I know,” said Osei. “That’s why I want you to help. If only
you
said you’d be my guarantor, they’d hardly be able to refuse. They might not trust
me
, but with you in on it ...”

For one reason or another, and being at a bit of a loose end anyway, I sent for Seishichi and asked him whether he thought he could bring it off.

“Leave it to me, boss,” he said. “I swear I won’t do anything to embarrass you.”

So in the end I agreed, and the three of us went along to Marushichi. The owner, not surprisingly, sounded shocked.

“Nobody does that kind of thing, I’m afraid,” he said. “No pawnshop could keep going if it returned goods without getting the money back first.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “And I know we’re asking a lot. But if we leave Osei here instead, couldn’t you let us keep the kimonos for a while?”

That shocked him even more. “Come on, boss, give me a break, will you?” he said. “We deal in things, not bodies.”

“Well, then—this may sound weird, and it makes
me
look a fool, at least—but couldn’t I be the pledge while Osei’s here? That’d be good enough, surely?”

“You must be joking. It’d scare all my customers away, having a boss like you hanging around the shop.... Still ... you must have pretty good reasons for going as far as that. OK, then: I’ll give you back the goods. But make sure you bring in the money before the day’s out.”

So he gave way in the end, and brought out all the kimonos. Osei, to make it look right, went and sat inside the cage behind the counter. Then Seishichi disappeared with the bundle of clothes, and got Maruto to pay up on the spot.

He’d known what he was talking about, boasting that he could take care of everything: I found they’d lent him two thousand yen. I mean, two thousand—a ridiculous amount! I reckon it was his reputation more than the actual value of the stuff that did it. Anyway, we gave Marushichi their money back with interest, and Osei did what she wanted to with the extra cash. She used it on some black-market deal, that’s for certain. And she must have made quite a bit on it, too, because it wasn’t long before she’d got her kimonos back from Maruto as well.

One thing that showed she’d made a decent profit was this. I suppose it was a month or two after the pawnshop business, and I was still kicking my heels; I couldn’t organize any games, because you need customers for that, and there weren’t any. So one day I took my last hundred yen in ready cash and went to play at a place run by a boss called Gen-chan, in Senju.

But you’re never lucky at times like that. Before I knew what hit me, I’d lost it all. As I was sitting there feeling disgusted with myself, Gen-chan came up and said: “You haven’t got warmed up yet. How about another try?” Unlike some of us, he was doing pretty well in those days, and there were at least fifty men in the room.

I was tempted—it’s hard to leave without trying to recoup your losses after you’ve been asked to play another round —but, as I told him, the cash just wasn’t there.

“Come on,” he said, “you don’t need to say that kind of thing!” And he had someone bring me a wad of bills. There was five hundred yen there when I checked.

But my luck was out, and that went the same way as the first: straight down the drain. So he lent me some more. He did the same thing a couple more times, in fact; and I blew the lot.

So I thanked him, told him I’d pay him back tomorrow, and left. But I was in quite a state, I can tell you. I hadn’t just lost, I’d lost
eight hundred yen
. I couldn’t possibly scrape up that much money.

I went home feeling pretty sick, then sat down and did some hard thinking. The boss of the Dewaya couldn’t just say “Look, I’m sorry, I’m broke, so let me off.” And he couldn’t run for it, either—it would have made a laughingstock of him.

I was racking my brains there, leaning against the charcoal brazier and poking at the ash with the tongs, when I heard a voice behind me. It was Osei.

“What are
you
doing here?” I asked.

“That’s a fine way to welcome a woman,” she said. “What’s up?” And she looked at me closely.

“Nothing.”

“I don’t believe a word of it. Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

Osei was pretty sharp, you know. She could tell at a glance that I was in trouble. It was no use trying to hide it, so I said,

“Oh, it’s nothing much, I just lost every game I played today.”

“How come? I thought you were an expert.” But she looked sympathetic, all the same.

“Gen-chan said he’d lend me some more money, so I was fool enough to take it—and then I went and lost that, too.”

“Wow. How much was it?”

Well, I didn’t have anyone else to talk to, and I was feeling low. At times like that, you’re glad of somebody you can at least tell the facts to without worrying, so I ended up coming clean: told her how much I’d taken with me, how much I’d borrowed, and so on.

“I see,” she said, cool as a cucumber. “Uncle, listen—let me take care of it.”